There are many icons to guide women on the way to progress and success..

Ranjini Manian
Ranjini Manian

I was recently in Mumbai for the Cherie Blair Foundation conference “Women Mean Business”, where the who’s who of women power raised their voices in unison for inclusive growth and advancement of women and girls in India.

The role models are all here. They tell their story straight. They are ready to give to India, and all that the rest of us have to do is ask and be willing to commit to hard work.

Will the ‘India soft power story’, as Union Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor called it (in a recent, inspiring speech at TED India), be sustainable? It will be sustainable, so long as we think of people and planet along with profit, I tell myself.

But the warning signs loomed on the Mumbai skyline – I tried to peer through the pollution-created haze at the city that houses Asia’s largest slum. No, it is not just the ‘December fog’, as my driver assured me it is. This is nature calling out for recognition that there’s immediate and urgent work to be done, much more than changing a few light bulbs at home.

Anyway, back to women power. Cherie Blair, barrister specialising in public law, human rights, employment and European community law and wife of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had promised to commit to Asian women and be a catalyst of change in India. Now she has galvanised us all to sit together, to talk, listen, share and commit.

A top cop speaks

Kiran Bedi stole the show with her dual attitude of ‘Never say die’, and ‘It’s all up to me’. “If you move me out of Delhi because I move and shake up the police system, and put me in a prison office, I will shake things up there as well and win an International Magsaysay Award in the process. I will run the Tihar Jail as an ashram and bring lasting change with or without the nods of required approval,” was her take! She reminds us of a cartoon published on the day she was transferred out of Tihar, which said: “The most dangerous criminal of Tihar is released”! She talked to us of the achievable dream of Navjyoti, the NGO she runs, and is clear that so long as she has health, she will commit to the betterment of India. Her commitment, which many of us here have agreed to support, is to create a huge workforce of ‘caregivers’ from the talented pool of Indian women who have completed 12 {+t} {+h} class. They will be trained to look after old people and children. This will free other Indian women to work longer and more calmly. This, in turn, will help in reducing the alarming attrition rate of women in IT.

Women of substance

That was the story of one powerful woman leader, and the conference heard about many other commitments from different fields – Vandana Luthra of VLCC Wellness and Fitness Clinics, who encourages imitation of her profit share-ownership model of entrepreneurship; Ritu Kumar who is willing to co-create with others a revival of dying arts in India; Loomba Trust’s Raj who disarmingly reveals that his inspiration for his commitment to improving the lot of over 20,000 widows in India is his widowed mother; and Cherie herself, who commits to working with the National Entrepreneurs Network (NEN) to fund, educate and support entrepreneurs in India.

Bright flames at two ends

Shabana Azmi’s “ sher”-tinged talk on social giving, a range of hard work and dynamic stories from Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, gender-neutral policies that Naina Lal Kidwai and Chanda Kochar’s corporation have adopted – these are some of the other motiviating subjects we listened to.

And they all find an echo in what I hear a fellow delegate saying to her maid over her cell phone during tea break: “ Kay sabzi ahe? Bhath tev, Hye nahi yenar, mulala phakt …” (“What vegetables do we have in the fridge, my husband won’t be home but do feed the children, and oh yes, cook some rice too, please.”) Here is Suchita, a stock broker, a local role model, aspiring to learn from national ones, enriching her mind while giving her maid instructions.

I’m reminded of two quotations, one from George Bernard Shaw, who said: “Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations”; the other from the Buddha: “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.” Knowledge never decreases by being shared, I say to myself.

So, women new managers, stay inspired, stay at work, stay connected with role models, simply, stay on. India needs you for her progress, the world needs you for its survival. As you naturally understand and nurture people, and planet, profit, will, of course, follow.

Shreyo Bhooyad Sakala Janaanaam. May good things happen to all people on the planet, as a woman reader of this column recently shared with me.

(The writer, Ranjini Manian, is CEO of Global Adjustments, a relocation and cross-cultural services company, and is also the author of Doing Business in India for Dummies. Contact: info@globaladjustments.com)